Active Knowledge Making, Part 2A: What Does It Mean to Be an Engaged Learner?

For more than 3 decades we have heard educators and technologists making a case for the transformative power of technology in learning. However, despite the rhetoric, in many sites and many ways education is still relatively untouched by technology. Even when technologies are introduced, the changes sometimes seem insignificant and the results seem disappointing. If the print textbook is replaced by an e-book, do the social relations of knowledge and learning necessarily change at all or for the better? If the pen-and-paper test is mechanized, does this change the nature of our assessment systems? Technology, in other words, need not necessarily bring significant change. Technology might not even represent a step forward in education.
This course explores 7 affordances of e-learning ecologies, which open up genuine possibilities for what we call New Learning—transformative, 21st century learning:
1. Ubiquitous Learning
2. Active Knowledge Making
3. Multimodal Meaning
4. Recursive Feedback
5. Collaborative Intelligence
6. Metacognition
7. Differentiated Learning
These affordances, if recognized and harnessed, will prepare learners for success in a world that is increasingly dominated by digital information flows and tools for communication in the workplace, public spaces, and personal life. This course offers a wide variety of examples of learning technologies and technology implementations that, to varying degrees, demonstrate these affordances in action.
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Recommended Background
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This course is designed for people interested in the future of education and the "learning society," including people who may wish to join education as a profession, practicing teachers interested in exploring future directions for a vocation that is currently undergoing transformation, and community and workplace leaders who regard their mission to be in part "educative."

从本节课中

Module 2: Active Knowledge Making + Multimodal Meaning

This module examines two more e-learning affordances: "active knowledge making," or the right and responsibility of learners to take a degree of control over their own knowledge making; and "multimodal meaning-making," or the tools learners now have at hand to support their thinking and to represent the knowledge they have gained – including, for instance, text, image, diagram, animation, simulation, dataset, video, audio, or embedded web media.